A critique of Wolak's evaluation of the NZ electricity market: The incentive to exercise market power with elastic demand and transmission loss

This paper is the second in a symposium of papers that examine the 2009 report by Frank Wolak into the New Zealand electricity market. In this paper, we discuss the Report's measures of the ability and incentives of generators to exercise unilateral market power. We show that the construction and interpretation of these measures are highly sensitive to some key assumptions, particularly those concerning the elasticity of demand for electricity in the wholesale market and the amount of transmission loss on the national grid.